Bruce

Thank-you for your patience. We are very sorry about the delay.

if that’s the right way, then one thing I’m concerned about is the fact that users will always see the “update billing” form when they view this page.

It sounds like what you need to do is use s2Member’s Shortcode Condtiionals to decide when to show the Billing Update Form. If a User is s2Member Level 0 / Subscriber, they should not have access to this form, because this means that they are not a Paid Subscriber.

So you’d do something like this:

[s2If current_user_is('subscriber')]
	My Update Billing Form goes here.
[/s2If]

the concern is that members could accidentally sign up for another membership because, as far as I understand, filling out this [s2Member-Pro-AuthNet-Form modify=”1″ …] form will re-start their membership, no matter what their current status, right?

That’s right. A Modification Form will delete a User’s current subscriptions, and create a new one. If you’d like to make sure that you prevent Users from buying something that they already have, I’d recommend checking out s2Member’s Shortcode Conditionals for this, too. You can check to see if a User already has access to what your Modification Form is making available before making the form available.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Simple/Shortcode Conditionals

Thank you for reporting this important issue.

Could you please send us a Dashboard Login so we can take a look at what’s happening on your server?

Please send the details here: s2Member® » Private Contact Form

Thank you for reporting this important issue. ~ We appreciate your patience.

To create each new custom field I followed this path (S2>General Settings>Registration/Profile Fields & Options).

Are you certain you pressed the Save All Changes button at the bottom of the page after creating your form(s)? These forms do not save until you press this button.

If you can confirm that you have done this, and that your Custom Profile/Registration Forms do show up in your Dashboard after you’ve saved them, and they still do not show up in your BuddyPress Registration Page, please send us a Dashboard login here:

s2Member® » Private Contact Form

Thank you for your inquiry.

You’d use the second ID you see here. That’s your Recurring Profile’s ID, which will be sent to s2Member in every IPN Notification for the User.

Thank you for your inquiry. ~We appreciate your patience.

So, %%current_user_ccaps%% doesn’t work (I borrowed that from the options within the Login Welcome settings. What should I have here to pull in that ccaps value?

This replacement code will list out ALL Custom Capabilities that the User has here. Because you’re already kind of “hacking” this redirect, I would recommend just getting the User’s Custom Capabilties the old fashioned way with current_user_can() here. You should be able to find out if the User has a Custom Capability, and redirect them appropriately that way.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals
See Also: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_redirect.

As a side question, right now I’m just assigning one ccaps per member, but if in the future I add multiple, I’m assuming that will break this functionality?

As I mentioned, this is listing out ALL of the User’s Custom Capabilities, so it wouldn’t really “break” this, if you have it set up correctly. But I’d still recommend just using s2Member’s PHP Conditionals here.

Thank you for your inquiry. ~ We appreciate your patience. :-)

A user can belong to one or more user groups, as its possible that a gp (clinical staff) could also be on the board / governing body. The user that is created now has access rights to all content and pages for that particular user group (s)

Because of this fact, standard Member Levels will not work for you here. s2Member’s Membership Levels are incremental, meaning that an s2Member Level 2 Member will have access to anything that’s protected at s2Member Level 2, s2Member Level 1, and s2Member Level 0/Subscriber.

You will need to use s2Member’s Custom Capabilities here. Custom Capabilities are a more advanced feature of s2Member, and they are NOT incremental. A User can have as many Custom Capabilities as you’d like them to, and you can protect content with Custom Capabilities just as you might with Membership Levels (such as through the Postmeta box in the Add/Edit Post screen):

What I would recommend doing here is assigning each section of your content a Custom Capability. Take your first type of User, Stakeholders.

They are allowed to the following:

– the downloads page within the events section (allowed to general public, doesn’t need a ccap)
– the entire clinical area (allowed to general public, doesn’t need a ccap)
– the archives pages within the library & resources section (allowed to general public, doesn’t need a ccap)
– the clinical and board bog page within the get in touch section (lets give this the ccap clin_board_page)

So, Users that should be Stakeholders should only be given the Custom Capability clin_board_page. You can then give them this Custom Capabilty, and protect this content with this Custom Capability.

You can then do this with all other capabilities that are not available to the general public for your other levels. Then, you’ll be able to assign specific Custom Capabilities to specific Users to allow them access to the content they should have access to.

As for your Page’s content, this is not something that’s going to actually concern s2Member. I did notice you said the following, though:

However, all registered users will have access to multiple category types of articles, so they will require tge ability to distinguish which category type each article is.

If you were using Membership Levels, you could simply use Category/Tag Access Restrictions here. But because you’re using Custom Capabilities, you should only need to assign different types of Posts different Custom Capabilities here. That will serve as your separators.

Please let us know if you have any further questions/concerns. :-)

Thank you for your inquiry. ~ We appreciate your patience.

Want we want to do, is sell subscriptions based on authors and categories. So, a user should be able to pay for a subscription for category A and B, and eventually for Author A. (if author subscriptions aren’t possible, we can figure out another way to solve that, by making an author a category as well) That means, someone would get access to all posts made by author X or Y, or all posts in category A. If for some reason a post in category A is also in category B, ofcourse you should still have access.

This is not supported by s2Member’s logic. s2Member’s protections work on with an “AND” logic, meaning that if you require two different permissions, s2Member will require Users to always have both of these permissions to access the content.

The only way I can see you setting this up would be through some tricky Custom Capabilities, which are individual capabilities (or permissions) that you can give to Users through Buy Now Buttons / Pro Forms. If you’d like to see all the info on Custom Capabilities, please see this video playlist:

Video » s2Member (Custom Capabilities)

To achieve what you need here, you’ll need separate Custom Capabilities for each package of Posts/Categories that you’re selling, and you’ll need to break these down farther for each Author. For instance, if you have 3 Authors, and 3 Packages of Posts, you might have the following Custom Capabilities:

cat1_author1
cat1_author2
cat1_author3

cat2_author1
cat2_author2
cat2_author3

cat3_author1
cat3_author2
cat3_author3

Then if a User were to buy a Package for Category 1, you’d sell Custom Capabilities cat1_author1, cat1_author2, and cat1_author3. If they were to buy a Package for Author 2, they’d be buying cat1_author2, cat2_author2, and cat3_author2…

When you don’t have a subscription to a certain category, we do want to show you the category archive page, but with a message on top which brings you to the subscribe page. For posts which you don’t have access to, we want people to see a teaser (excerpt), which brings you to the registration page. This would be best if we’re able to manage this through the templates.

This would need to be done through your theme template to make it automated. You can use s2Member Advanced PHP Conditionals here. With these conditionals you can check if a User has access to content, and show the full post, or just a teaser depending on their Capabilities.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals

A small question, can we translate the plugin with a .mo file if we want?

Yes, s2Member is full compatible with WordPress I18n.

See: Pre Sale FAQs » Can s2Member® be translated into other languages?

Last thing, we want to implement our own payment system (dutch iDeal) is there any documentation about integrating other payment systems? And very last, since iDeal doesn’t support recurring payments, will the plugin email you a (customizable) warning that your subscription ends with a link to renew it?

s2Member supports multiple methods of integrating custom Payment Gateways. The best way is to use s2Member’s PayPal w/ Proxy Key functionality, which will allow your developer(s) to pass data through s2Member’s core processing routines for PayPal, which will allow you to automate much of this process.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› PayPal® IPN Integration -> IPN w/ Proxy Key

Alternatively, you could use Remote Operations, but s2Member’s standard emails will not be sent, and you will need to process more yourself.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Remote Operations API

Let us know if you have any further questions/concerns. :-)

Thanks for the follow-up.

when will ccaps be able to be added to multiple pages in the dashboard –

is this part and parcel of the issues with working with the serialized arrays in the wp-usermeta that s2 relies on – it has been awhile since I have heard anything about it, but about six months ago there was discussion from s2 regarding

This is something that our development team is hard at work with right now. The way that s2Member’s Capabilities and Roles will be made much easier to edit for developers in the database. For now, this is not possible. I’m very sorry.

I will put in a feature request and see if this is a simple fix that could be added in a maintenance release of s2Member. Currently there is no solid release date for the version of s2Member that will have these features.

Thanks for the follow-up.

While I want to sell packages that maintain access for a period of time, I have no need for them to be rebilled automatically, I just want access to drop off at the end of the time (i.e. one month, one year). The customer should be able to buy several packages though.

As Jason mentioned, Custom Capabilities would probably work perfectly for you here. You can protect Post/Pages with Custom Capabilities just as you would with Member Level Access Restrictions. The only difference is that Membership Levels are incremental, meaning that an s2Member Level 2 User would have access to everything a s2Member Level 1 Member would.

Custom Capabilities do not work this way, which means that you can have all Users sign up at the same level, with a specified number of Custom Capabilties (or as you call them Packages). Each of these Custom Capabilities would protect one or many Posts/Pages on your site, and Users can buy more Custom Capabilities with the forms here later:

Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Capability (Buy Now) Forms

Does that make sense?

Thanks for the follow-up.

I wouldn`t like to have my “free files” available for non members. So, they should be at least “free subscriber” to get them.

You can protect these links with Shortcode Conditionals.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Simple/Shortcode Conditionals

Does this mean that the purchases you sent shortcode for tracking will not be included? That is, that these specific Post/Page Access purchases are not associated with the user/member in the database?

That’s correct. Specific Post/Page Access is completely separate form s2Member Level/Capability restrictions. You do not need a User account for these.

Thanks for this, Bruce. Unfortunately setting the rra to “0″ doesn’t solve the problem. Someone at PayPal retested the process for me with an invalid card and they still received the “Your account has been activated” message plus the welcome email.

From the docs:

rra=”2″ Reattempt failed payments? Possible values: 0 = do NOT reattempt billing when/if a recurring payment fails; 1 or higher = yes, DO reattempt billing when/if a recurring payment fails. With PayPal® Pro integration, PayPal® will retry a maximum of 2 times whenever rra=”2″; after that, a Subscription would be terminated due to Max Failed Payments having been reached. With PayPal® Pro integration, the value of this attribute also configures Max Failed Payments. So a setting of rra=”2″ means that you allow a maximum of 2 failed payments.

You should have your RRA attribute set to this, but you may also want to check your PayPal Options here.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Account Details

Try changing your PayPal® Pro Forms / Recurring Profile Behavior to consolidated here.